This course introduces class participants to the political significance and societal consequences of challenges facing U.S. and international policymakers. It is designed to help participants develop skills to analyze policy proposals and advocate for their preferred options for issues on the public policy agenda ahead. The class assumes basic knowledge about governing institutions and democratic processes, while recommending supplemental materials for further study to complement reading links provided. The course focuses on future policy challenges, while examining the broad historical context in which policies are adopted and implemented.
As the course evaluates how issues are advanced by private sector interests, non-governmental organizations, and government policymakers, it examines how groups become effective policy advocates. Particular attention is paid to how winning coalitions are formed and how issue framing shapes the outcome of policy campaigns. The goal is neither to produce partisan talking points, nor to favor one governance philosophy over others. Rather it is to clarify the public policy challenges ahead and to enhance participants’ understanding of how policy options are adopted in the real world arena of contemporary politics.

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Professor Gerry Warburg

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>> But I want to stop and talk a little bit about the media which is something that we live in the midst of, right? But it has changed dramatically since I came to Washington in 1992. There were you know, there are, first there are vastly more outlets that there were. When I went to the White House there were basically three broadcast television networks right, ABC, NBC, and CBS. CNN was, was cable and it was just starting. And you know Wolf, Wolf Blitzer became the White House Correspondent after he had been kind of became a star during the Gulf War. But CNN wasn't, wasn't really very important. Then there were the daily papers, right. There were the big one's that we still see today. The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal. And the regional papers, like the L.A. Times and the Chicago Tribune. And there was talk radio, and there were wire services. But there was no internet, right? There were no blogs, there were no social media, there was no 24/7 kind of churning it, there was, you know, weekly news magazines. I mean, think of that, that reported back on the entire week. Now something that reports on what happened yesterday, let alone four days ago, is, is old news. So, there are multiple outlets for, not only every interest, from you know, gardening to guns or sometimes both, guns and gardening. >> [LAUGH] >> But everything in between. And there's a point, there's an outlet for every point on the ideological spectrum too, right. It's not just different interests. It's different points of view. And that means that you know you have Fox and MSNBC and you have the New York Times ed page versus the Wall Street journals. And you have the Huffpost versus the Drudge Report and so you have very ide, there's room for every ideological kind of, position on the spectrum. It reminds me a little bit of what the world was like, it, around 1900 in New York City there were 27 daily newspapers, right. And it, each one played a, a or hit a spot, different spot on the ideological spectrum and that, in some ways that's great we're in a, kind of, a churning transition period. But at other times it means that you know we don't even agree on basic facts let alone interpretations of those facts. It's all, it's on vivid display as we watch how the Affordable Care Act gets covered every day, right. You know, MSNBC, if you turn on MSNBC, you'll hear about how 7.1 million people have signed up. How millions more, people your age have been able to stay on their parents' policies if they [COUGH] don't have a job that provides health care yet. How millions more were able to access healthcare through expansion of Medicaid and other pro, or, or, or were able to stay on their policies even though their child got sick, or somebody expended their lifetime cap. And if you turn to Fox you hear a totally different story. How the whole pro, process is a disaster. How costs are rising. How all those 7 million people, most of them were kicked off of policies they were told they could keep if they would, if they liked, by the President. So, you know again, the same program, the same reality, but its a different reality. Just like, like Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan from New York used to say, everyone's entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own set of facts. But we increasingly live in a world where we do have blue facts and red facts, right. And there's no place where that's more easily on display than around the Affordable Care Act. The same facts become different facts, in the hands of different ideologies. And so it's a very challenging time as we have all these outlets. Now, so not only do we have all these outlets in different, you know, a, again, a much more ideological press than we had, you know, in the 60s, 50s, 60s, and 70s in this kind of age where of, of the, of the kind of, we believed in a objective media, right. Walter Cronkite was the voice of, of America, not just of one ideology. We're no longer there. And it, so we have all these different outlets with different points of view. Expand and, and that exacerbated by or is com, complicated by the fact that information moves so fast, right. It moves around the world instantaneously, and it's available to everybody. So there's no longer any real news cycle, right. When I first started doing this there was a news cycle. And it started in the morning with morning papers which basically reported yesterdays news. And reporters would kind of roll in to work around 10 o'clock in the morning and they would sort of read yesterdays news and then they would cover events that happened that day. And the network news cast would pretty much report on, you know, the, the evening newscast on Tuesday for reflective of what was in the paper on Tuesday morning. A little bit what happened during the day on Tuesday. But the morning paper still drove the evening broadcast to an aston, to an astonishing degree. And then there was an end to the day, right. At the end of the day, the network newscast would happen at 6 or 6:30, or 7 o'clock. Newspapers would go to bed and the new cycle would end. That is no longer true. News can break anytime and it does. And not only has that changed the way we as consumers of news kind of relate to it, it's changed the way planners organize their days. You know, it used to be that the President would never give a news conference at 4 o'clock. That was too late. It was past deadline, you couldn't do it. It wasn't done. Now you can do it at 5, you know, my friends at the White House say, oh we can put the President on at 6 o'clock. That's fine. It'll still make, you know the late night cable shows, the morning papers, and the morning news shows. And it will still dominate the news cycle. Totally different approach to how to, to, to how it is now. And one of the interesting, most interesting things to me about, about these kind of combinations of changes is that, it's shifted control from the media, to the White House or to the, to, to the, to the content creators, if you will. The White House is the biggest content creator in the political game, right. And so it used to be if the President was meeting with the head of state or an important person, you know, he would go into the Oval Office and they would sit in chairs and he would invite a group of news reporters to come in and take a picture, right. Because you wanted people to know the President was meeting with this person and that, you know, a little bit about maybe what they were talking about. And the only way to do that was to invite the media in. Now what happens? The White House photographer goes in and takes a picture and maybe the White House video crew takes some, some video. They post it on their website, maybe with a press release. They push it out through their social channels. And if the press doesn't like it, they don't have to use it, but there's no other game in town. Right, and so much control, not only in terms of timing, but in terms of content has shifted to the White House. And I think that's increased the tension between the news media and the, and, and the practitioners of politics. And I think its contributed to the sense of, of constant conflict that we see in our politics. I don't think it's anybody's fault, that's just the way technology, is changing the game. You know, and, and, it's, it's changed the relationship, in some ways between the public and the president. Last Christmas, some of you may notice the president went to Hawaii. And either the news, you know, there's always a, a pool of reporters that go with him, travel everywhere he travels. They never saw him. They did not see him once. They had reporters that followed him around all day long in a van. If he was in, in, in his house with his family, they were parked in a van outside. They never saw him. If he went to a restaurant downtown, they went to a restaurant nearby but never saw him. The only time they saw him was when he was playing golf. And one of and, and the course briefly was visible from a public road. So they brought the reporters in and let them take a picture of the President walking by and that was the only con, contact they had with him. So in, and it's, it's, it's counter intuitive. In an era where we have access to everything. We don't have access to everything. I think it complicates the political process and it complicates what we have to do in order to move things forward. You know, the one of the things the White House talks about is that they say that they don't do business with much of the reporters because there's a lot of young reporters who don't have the context. They don't have any experience. They haven't been around long enough. And I think that from the press side they would argue that, why would we put our best reporters into a job where they're sitting in a van and they never see the President. So it's a bit of a chicken and egg conversation, but I think again, it complicates the environment a lot. When I got to the White House the New York Times had four reporters on the beat, Thomas Friedman, Maureen Dowd, Gwen Eiffel who's now an anchor at PBS, and a guy by the name of Mike Kelly, who was killed in, in the Iraq War. That was the A-plus team. And when you're looking at into the press briefing room every day and you're facing reporters of that caliber, it changes the way you do business. So just, just kind of an interesting perspective on how much things have changed and how some things that we take for granted, like more access to information, may not actually be happening in practice. And something for people to think about.